バイリンガル聴解の維持 : バイリンガル両耳異刺激聴取タスクとワーキングメモリキャパシティ

抄録

A controlled-attention view of working memory capacity (WMC) in the bilingualism literature has demonstrated that being bilinguals is advantageous for them to focus on relevant speech and effectively suppress irrelevant one. This paper presents results from a psycholinguistic study on the experimental notion of 'sustainability of listening comprehension (SLC)' among bilinguals, which exposits their ability to sustain their listening comprehension when they need to switch between the two languages and inhibit an interfering option. A new experimental paradigm where bilinguals listen to two languages binaurally and what they hear are semantically re/unrelated, called a 'bilingual dichotic listening task,' was developed and administered to investigate the SLC with regard to WMC, L2 proficiency, language laterality, age of acquisition, length of learning, length of stay and amount of exposure to each language. The results from twenty-five participants showed that comprehension in both languages was sustained through semantic and language interferences. Higher WMC indicated a significant contribution to better comprehension. WMC seems to play an important role in maintaining attention to one of the two familiar languages while inhibiting re/irrelevant information in the same or other language and in sustaining listening comprehension in the attended language.